Toeing the Line

 "OUR AGE is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes."

"Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?"

"Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?"

"The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature"

I've always toed the line, from an early age. I was raised by my older brothers and sisters (four of one, eight of the other), but always subject to (and often punished under) the authority of my father, an Air Force officer who put his rank and duty before the family, and expected his family to give him the same attention, respect and obedience as his subordinates in the Air Force.

I didn't know what 'negotiation' meant, on a visceral level. I didn't learn how to let a conversation unfold, or a job opportunity work for me as much as for my employer, or relax into a relationship with an equal. There were orders, and then there was either obedience or mutiny. There was direct, immediately actionable communication, or else there was nonsense.

For me, privacy was, and is, the antidote to harsh, direct, unnegotiable engagement with other humans. Sleep, too. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas, living in the dorm, I often found my way back to my dorm room, in the middle of the day between classes, when the hall was quiet, and I would crawl up to my top bunk - almost hidden like a loft from someone coming through the door - and take a nap.

That didn't work, even then, to teach me to negotiate. I would barely fall asleep, then rouse myself in a panic, and get back out in the world.

If back then I had learned what I practice now: May the spirit of truth and knowledge guide my engagement with others. Or, another thing I've learned: My ultimate loyalty and devotion is to Love, not to human personalities or bodies. I am to be guided by Wisdom, Grace, and Truth, not by a human body - including my own.

I do mean 'practice,' by the way. I am a belligerent beginner. Maybe that explains my reaction last night when I read the passage I quoted from Emerson. I was totally floored. Flabbergasted, especially if flaggergasted means 'breath-taking'. I full-chaliced. I took a quick deep breath (which took less time than to say 'I took a quick deep breath') - it felt like I did, anyway - and floated in motionlessness. 

If I had really learned, really knew, that negotiation with others is a feature of my being, then what Emerson wrote would get an unselfconscious nod of agreement and appreciation, and an expectation of hearing a new and exciting implication of a long-ago learned law or rule of the universe. Instead, I silently gasped.

Because it's so obvious. Why shouldn't this age - 2022, and Emerson's 1836 - have it's own, original relationship with the universe? Why shouldn't there be continual revelation? How could there not be continual revelation, and therefore always new poetry, always new science, always beyond poetry and science?

And theology.

And morality.

Even language itself, cuz I don't even know how the words 'theology' and 'morality' show up in conversation these days. Why shouldn't I have my own encounter with reality, my own revelation from the universe? Why should I have to adopt some pre-packaged worldview, from a wide selection of worldviews, but none of them my own creation, or my own experience.

I can negotiate with reality. I can communicate with the universe, consciously, awake, in real time. And I will have my own poetry, philosophy, insight, intuition. In fact, I have to. I must.

But here's the catch, which is more like a completely dark place we have to pass through before we can all share a universe again: each and every single individual person must, and will eventually, have their own personal, private, secret, encounter with the universe. That means I must be alone with the universe, without anyone else.

This isn't just about loneliness or solitude. This is about guiding myself, absolutely, on my own, through the dark place. Yes, I 'see' the universe, but everything that tells me what to think about that universe, is gone, invisible, muted. I have to learn for myself, directly, in the moment. I have to communicate directly with the universe, back and forth, until we get to know one another.

The fear, or the lie, or the established argument, is that if everything else really is muted, and there's just me, then really there'd be nothing, because I am nothing except in relation to what I can perceive, what is outside me, the external world, that orients me much, much, much more deeply than I consciously know.

The dark place is where you let go of everything external. It's supposed to be the edge of the mental world. Self, if it means anything, it means what you can describe in perceptual terms, in the broad sense of perceiving. So if you let go of everything external, then you've let go of almost everything that you recognize as part of you. As you.

I don't know if Emerson also meant the individual, rather than an age of people, who must have their own life with the universe, but I don't know of any other way for an age of people to do so unless some individuals are doing it.

This makes sense of my resort to privacy, and sleep, as premature attempts to turn inward and consciously walk through the dark place. If not premature, in any case, unsuccessful in teaching me to negotiate with the external world. Really, externality itself. I was tired of toeing the line, as my father taught me to do, but knew nothing else.

But I see no other way of learning to negotiate, than to become a being who knows what and who he is. And that requires being alone, with just the universe and me.